Jaboury Ghazoul's first encounter with tropical rain forests in 1993 was a prolonged one, spending one year living rough in the forests of Vietnam where his scientific subjects were disturbingly close. It was during this year that he learnt to distinguish the sound of a chainsaw from the call of a cicada. Imbued with such knowledge and confidence, he began to study the reproductive ecology of plants in the context of land use change, working in Thailand and Costa Rica, employed by the Center for International Forestry Research and the Natural History Museum, London. Since joining Imperial College London in 1998, and ETH Zurich from 2005, he has expanded his research interests to encompass a variety of issues relating to tropical plant ecology, genetics and conservation. He generally selects nice places to work, and is thus currently engaged in research in India, Malaysia and the Seychelles. ; Douglas Sheil spent the first three years of his life in Nigeria. He returned to the tropics several times as a Natural Sciences student in Cambridge, before gaining a Masters Degree in Forestry and its relation to Land use from Oxford in 1989. He worked in East Africa for two years before returning to Oxford to complete his doctorate examining long-term dynamics of Ugandan rainforests in 1996. From 1998 to 2008 he worked for the Center for International Forest Research in Indonesia - where he was for a time the only staff ecologist. His work has taken him to all the main rain forest regions of the World. He is now director of the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation (ITFC), a field station under the Mbarara University of Science and Technology, located in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, in South West Uganda - a site famed for its mountain gorillas. His publications have covered a wide range of tropical forest topics. Current research includes ecology, conservation and human needs.